American
Vaudeville, more so than any other mass entertainment, grew out
of the culture of incorporation that defined American life after the Civil
War. The development of vaudeville marked the beginning of popular entertainment
as big business, dependent on the organizational efforts of a growing
number of white-collar workers and the increased leisure time, spending
power, and changing tastes of an urban middle class audience. Business
savvy showmen utilized improved transportation and communication technologies,
creating and controlling vast networks of theatre circuits standardizing,
professionalizing, and institutionalizing American popular entertainment.

In
the years before the war, entertainment existed on a different scale.
Certainly, variety theatre existed before 1860. Europeans enjoyed types
of variety performances years before anyone even had conceived of the
United States. On American soil, as early as the first decades of the
nineteenth century, theatre goers could enjoy a performance of Shakespeare,
acrobats, singers, presentations of dance, and comedy all in the same
evening.1As the years progressed,
seekers of diversified amusements found an increasing number to choose
from. A handful of circuses regularly toured the country, dime-museums
appealed to the curious, amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls

often featured "cleaner" presentations of variety entertainment,
while saloons, music-halls, and burlesque houses catered to those with a
taste for the risqué.2In the
1840's, minstrel shows, another type of variety performance, and "the
first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture," grew
to enormous popularity and formed as Nick Tosches writes, "the heart
of nineteenth-century show business."3Medicine shows traveled the countryside offering programs of comedy, music,
jugglers and other novelties along with their tonics, salves, and miracle
elixirs, while Wild West Shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing
frontier complete with trick riding, music, and drama. Vaudeville incorporated
these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form
centered in America's growing urban hubs.

Problematically, the term "vaudeville," itself, referring specifically
to American variety entertainment, came into common usage after 1871 with
the formation of "Sargent's Great Vaudeville Company" of Louisville,
Kentucky, and had little if anything to do with the "vaudeville"
of the French theatre. Variety showman, M.B. Leavitt claimed the word
originated from the French "vaux de ville" ("worth of the
city, or worthy of the city's patronage"), but in all likelihood,
as Albert McLean suggests, the name was merely selected "for its vagueness,
its faint, but harmless exoticism, and perhaps its connotation of gentility."4Leavitt and Sargent's shows differed little from the coarser material
presented in earlier itinerant entertainments, although their use of the
term to provide a veneer of respectability points to an early effort to
cater variety amusements to the growing middle class.

In the early 1880's, Tony Pastor, a former ringmaster with the circus
turned theatre manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and
spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in several
of his New York theatres. Hoping to draw a potential audience from female
and family-based shopping traffic uptown, Pastor barred the sale of liquor
in his theatres, eliminated questionable material from his shows, and
offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees.5Pastor's experiment proved successful and other managers soon followed
suit.

1875 Variety Show
Poster

B.F. Keith

Benjamin Franklin Keith, however, earns the distinction of "the father"
of American Vaudeville. Keith began his career in show business working
variously as a grifter and barker with traveling circuses in the 1870's,
and for dime museums in New York. He returned to his home state of Massachusetts
and in 1883 established his own museum in Boston featuring "Baby Alice
the Midget Wonder" and other acts. His success in this endeavor allowed
Keith to build the Bijou Theatre. The Bijou, a lavishly appointed, state-of-the-art,
fireproof theatre, set the standard for the shape of things to come. At
the Bijou, Keith established a "fixed policy of cleanliness and order."
He strictly forbade the use of vulgarity or coarse material in his acts
"so the that the house and the entertainment would directly appeal to
the support of women and children. . ."6Keith strictly enforced his policies at the Bijou as he would in all his
subsequent theatres. He ruled with an iron fist, censuring and censoring
performers whose acts fell below his standards of decency. Keith posted
signs backstage ordering performers to eliminate "vulgarity and suggestiveness
in words, action, and costume" while performing in his theatre "under
fine of instant discharge."7As an
added measure, Keith invited (with publicity) "a Sunday School dignitary
to judge propriety at rehearsals."8

Keith's triumph as a showman lay chiefly in his ability to bridge the
gulf between notions of "high" and "low" entertainments
that grew increasingly wider in the years following the Civil War. He
reinforced his theatres' image of gentility by including acts from the
"legitimate" stage, drawing an audience previously unavailable
to variety amusements. Simultaneously, he maintained a number of acts
whose forms would have been familiar to fans of the earlier variety stage
without alienating either constituency. As his partner Edward F. Albee
would later write, the programs at Keith's theatres ensured "there is
something for everybody."9Keith's
appeal to the growing middle class sense of refinement not only won him
the business of women and children, but attracted the notice of Boston's
powerful Catholic Church as well. The Church amply funded the expansion
of the Keith enterprise on the promise of more clean entertainment. Keith
and Albee built even more elaborate theatres in Boston with help from
the Church and they duplicated their success in other Northeastern cities.

Within a few short years, imitators sprung up around the country. Managers
like S. Z. Poli, Klaw and Erlanger, F.F. Proctor, Marcus Loew, and Martin
Beck began their own profitable enterprises, following the lead of Keith
and Albee. By the 1890's vast theatre circuits spanned the country and
"comprehensive networks of booking offices" handled promotion and production.10Subscribing to a business acumen that mirrored the policies of captains
of industry, Keith and Albee consolidated their control of vaudeville,
first through the United Booking Artists and later through the establishment
of the Vaudeville Manager's Association, establishing a virtual monopoly
that lasted well past Keith's death in 1914.

While
in Boston, Keith also developed the policy of the continuous performance
that dominated vaudeville for almost two decades before the big-time theatres
returned to the two-a-day in the early twentieth century. The continuous
ran up to twelve hours, in which scheduled acts would appear two or three
times. The continuous provided the illusion of a constant and thriving business,
eliminating what Keith saw as "hesitancy" on the part of patrons
to enter the theatre until they were "reassured by numbers."11Keith's idea revolutionized variety entertainment and tailored it perfectly
to the conditions of life in the surrounding metropolis. A continuous twelve
hours of performances opened vaudeville to wider audiences than previously
possible. It caught as, Tony Pastor had hoped in New York, the overflow
of uptown

Grand Theatre in Buffalo, NY around 1900

shopping traffic, and catered to both a middle class population with unprecedented
leisure time and workers constrained by shift work. According to Keith
it didn't matter "what time of day you visit, the theatre is always occupied
by more or less people, the show is in full swing, everything is bright,
cheerful, and inviting."12Keith's
comments point to his recognition of the importance of managed spectacle
to attract urban audiences.

Alan
Trachtenberg writes: "[that] Of all city spectacles, none surpassed
the giant department store, the emporium of consumption born and nurtured
in these years."13Arguably, Trachtenberg
did not fully consider the vaudeville theatre as spectacle. Vaudeville theatres,
often known as "palaces," fiercely competed trying to outdistance
each other in luxury, elegance, and grandiosity. As one journalist wrote
at the opening of B.F. Keith's New Theatre in Boston in 1894:

The age of luxury seems to have reached its ultima thule. The
truth of this has never been impressed upon one so forcibly as in a visit
to Keith's dream palace of a theatre . . . .It is almost incredible that
all this elegance should be placed at the disposal of the public, the
poor as well as the rich.14

Keith's New Theatre, like F.F. Proctor's Pleasure Palace and many other
vaudeville theatres to come, adapted the excessive and opulent architectural
styles of Southern European palaces to create buildings with few precedents
in American cities. The front of Keith's New Theatre featured a wealth of
decorative detail. Wrought iron decorations, stained glass, incandescent
lighting, gargoyles, arches, and marble pillars proclaimed an emphatic message
of gentility, elegance, and success to all passersby. Keith's display continued
inside the theatre. He filled

the lobby and foyer with white and green marble, burnished brass, leather
upholstered furniture, large plate mirrors, and enormous panel paintings
by the "eminent artist Tojetti." Keith commissioned Tojetti to create
more panel paintings above the huge and heavily gilded proscenium arch
inside the auditorium, complimenting the ornate white and gold balconies,
twelve private boxes, and walls of green and "rich" rose "in a brocaded
silk effect."15The design of Keith's
New Theatre overlooked nothing. From the elaborate hand-painted ceiling
to "the finest toilet and retiring rooms in the country" to the number
oft "fragrant floral displays," the offering of "the purest artesian well
water" and the "writing materials furnished free--gold pens, sterling
silver handles, monogrammed paper and envelopes," Keith's New Theatre
conveyed a feeling of lavish abundance coupled with an inescapable air
of refinement.16Reportedly, even
the boiler room featured a thick carpets and a whitewashed coal bin.

Other
theatres in the Keith-Albee circuit, as well as those of their competitors,
followed along similar standards of luxury. Like the department stores
of the era as discussed by Trachtenberg, vaudeville palaces were "lavishly
designed palaces of consumption" using calculated spectacle to attract
customers.17Vaudeville palaces offered
entertainment, rather than strictly consumer goods per se, but they also
hoped to encourage customers to purchase concessions and relied heavily
on the advertisement of goods in their theatre programs. Also like department

Keith's New Theatre,
Boston 1894

stores,
vaudeville theatres functioned as a type of educational institution. Certainly,
the emphasis on the high moral character of his shows implied a set of ideals
regarding appropriate behavior, but Keith's theatres offered a more direct
education to the audience as well. His "fixed policy of cleanliness
and order" extended equally to the patrons of his theatres and the
acts on the stage. A vigilant army of ushers and uniformed attendants handed
customers printed cards from silver trays asking female patrons to remove
their hats or requesting that:

Gentlemen will kindly avoid carrying cigars or cigarettes in
their mouths while in the building, and greatly oblige. The Management

Gentlemen will kindly avoid the stamping of feet and pounding of canes
on the floor, and greatly oblige the Management. All applause is best
shown by clapping of hands.

Please don't talk during acts, as it annoys those about you, and prevents
a perfect hearing of the entertainment. The Management18

As
Keith would explain, "Our rule was to have the party approached by the
usher first, second by the assistant head usher, then by the head usher,
and lastly by the management who would request the party to leave . .
."19Keith's theatres and their policies
informed his audiences about changing standards of behavior acceptable
for the middle class. As he would later note, "The public needed to be
educated in these matters."20

Prior
to the Civil War, American audiences boisterously voiced their approval
or disapproval at theatrical performances by screaming, hollering, stomping,
throwing vegetables and other missiles, or in certain instances even rushing
the stage to attack performers or plead for encores. As the century drew
to a close, and the process of incorporation discussed by Alan Trachtenberg
accelerated along with its related processes of industrialization and
the formation of stricter cultural hierarchies, entertainment and audiences
were forced to change. In creating and maintaining the air of refinement
associated with his theatres, Keith successfully developed a form of variety
amusements well-suited for the new middle class and their urban lifestyles.
The sheer abundance, variety, and spectacle offered at Keith's theatres
helped to educate and transform American audiences in their new roles
as passive spectators and consumers of experience and sensation.